Posts Tagged ‘raw milk’

Awesome story in the New York Times about small farms returning to the use of draft animals to pull plows. As the story notes, there are added bonuses in addition to saving on fuel costs: The animals aerate the soil as they walk, they don’t leave ruts like wheels do, and of course free fertilizer!

Rich Ciotola with Larson, far left, and Lucas, the team of young oxen he works with in Sheffield, Mass. (photo by Jennifer May for The New York Times)

The dairy angle on the resurgence of hoof power is that this taps into the large supply of underused male livestock — required for breeding but not much else (story of our lives, fellas). This means that males are very cheap to acquire for plow use.

However, apparently mules are the best for Southern farms — they have a much higher heat tolerance.

Here’s an interesting story on the raw milk movement, from New York Magazine of all places, here.

The Morekis Dairy didn’t always pasteurize its milk; those laws came about sometime after the dairy’s 1909 founding. (They say that back in the day a bottle of milk, especially from the Jersey cows, was about one-third heavy butterfat cream, floating on the top.)

When the pasteurizing laws went through, this added enormous labor time and cost to the dairy. The pasteurization equipment itself was expensive, but adding to the cost was the staff time needed to exhaustively clean and disinfect all of it — an already-difficult task made more so because of the plethora of machinery.